BALTIMORE—For the fourth time, the capitalist courts will put Keith Davis Jr. on trail after being framed for two crimes. In 2015, he was the target of a brutal police shooting, the first since Freddie Gray earlier that year.
What has followed in the over two-year wake of that shooting has been nothing short of a racist judicial and prosecutorial circus. Keith is a target of police terror, a fact the cops are trying to justify by making up murder chargers against an innocent member of our class.
Criminal system prosecutes the victim
What began as a case of mistaken identity has evolved into a framing and cover-up of significant scale. A short recap:
At around 10 a.m. that morning, a hack driver reported an armed robbery in progress in his vehicle. The suspect fled. Police already on scene for another incident proceeded to chase. Neighborhood folks witnessing the chase, Davis included, scattered. Police lost sight of the suspect and began to chase Davis mistakenly.
The cops hased fired at Davis 44 times, struck 3 times, including once on his face, and rendered unconscious. Another lodged in his neck, not far from his spine.
Davis survived, only to be subsequently charged as that armed robbery suspect. He sat trial in late February of 2016 and was acquitted.
Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced charges of first-degree homicide regarding the murder of Kevin Jones, a security guard at Pimlico Racetrack shot hours before in the early morning on June 7, 2015.
On what grounds? A heavily-disputed partial palm print on a gun found near Davis in the garage. The gun was planted. There are no other connections at the murder scene. No motive. No personal connection to Jones. No DNA. No CCTV footage. Finally, he was cleared by eyewitness testimony.
Regardless, the first homicide trial was heard in May 2017. It ended in an 11-1 hung jury. That’s 11 not-guilty votes to 1 abstained vote. Rather than poll the jury, the now-disgraced Judge Alfred Nance declared a mistrial.
The second trail this past October was under Judge Lynn Stewart Mays. With the eleventh hour discovery (read: manufacturing) of a jailhouse witness, the capitalist state declared a second degree felony murder.
But the details of that witness soon would unraveled, leading Davis’ legal team, led by Latoya Francis-Williams, to win an appeal on the grounds of an ill-informed jury and perjured witness testimony.

In a few months, Davis will sit for his fourth trial. It begs the question: what is the State’s Attorney’s goal? How is the community being served by repeatedly prosecuting a man for whom there seems to be no case? What began as a mass acquittal of 15 charges relating to the initial robbery incident, evolved into a heavily defense-favored 11 to 1 hung jury mistrial, and ultimately ended up in an overturned conviction.
Servants of capitalist govt
This case exposes the role of this capitalist state that will go above and beyond to frame, convict, and lock up Black and Latin workers. The police, the courts, and politicians all work together to preserve this racist system. The criminal injustice system originates from slave patrols and slave laws. The modern capitalist legal system is born out of the law enforcement system that existed for the purpose of controlling the slave population and protecting the interests of slave owners.
We can only deduce that Mosby is not operating under the guise of being a public servant, as she claims. In fact, she is not a public servant. She is the capitalist state’s servant. She is the State’s Attorney, not the workers’ attorney. The Baltimore Police Department is an arm of the state and Mosby is fighting to preserve that arm. After all, Davis was mistakenly shot just one month after the Baltimore Uprising—the city was in no condition to handle another incident and Mosby’s career could not withstand a second round of cop indictments. Davis thus became the fall man.
Take the streets
Some argued for a new State’s Attorney come election time later this year. Voting is getting to choose which criminal will rob our dignity and livelihood next.
What is undeniable is the power of organized multiracial fightback. There has been mass organizing. In additions to bold protests in the streets, we protested in the lobby of the office building of the City State Attorney. We wrote letter to all the other judges, and held fundraising events. We also filled the courtrooms.  The judge told everyone to sit back down, and lectured us about how it’s illegal to attempt to influence a judge. She also said she didn’t read the letters sent to the judges. But, she was seemed to be clearly responding to the was strength, content, and quantity of those letters. The judge lied. Clearly, our mass actions had an effect.
And so, as 2018 begins, we must remain the streets. It is incumbent that we create new leaders and foster new relationships. Free Keith Davis, Jr. and all political prisoners! Here’s to a louder 2018.

HARLEM—The Washington Post has documented that 903 of our brothers and sisters were killed by kkkops in 2016. That’s more than two times the number reported by the FBI. This furious statistic compares with a Berea College study that estimates that an average of 54 lynchings a year were committed between 1882 and 1968. The U.S. bosses now arm and train a much deadlier “Klan in Blue” under the cover of white sheets. This racist practice is designed to intimidate all from fighting with multiracial unity. But where they have failed, we will succeed as the working class join in mass struggle against this racist capitalist system.
According to the same Washington Post survey, 418 of those killed by cops were white; 205 Black; 163 Latin: A total of 368 were Black and Latin! These figures prove that no worker is safe under this system. Seventy percent of the U.S. population is white, while 30 percent is Black and Latin. This huge display of racial disproportion, as because Black and Latin workers are killed at a rate three times higher than their white counterpart.
The Post evaluated that one out of four of these killings involved people undergoing mental crisis. Typically, family, friends, or neighbors become aware of a person suffering an acute, psychotic episode.  They call for help and too often the only number available is 911. Police arrive in uniform with visible weapons and command the person in crisis to surrender. A conflict ensues, and the person in need of help ultimately is shot dead, instead.
Deborah Danner
Over the past year, PLP comrades and friends in our congregation joined in many struggles for justice, first, on behalf of Deborah Danner who was killed in the Bronx on October 18, 2016 under the same circumstances. We rallied with many others in front of her building, and then marched to the precinct to demand prosecution of Sgt. Hugh Barry who claimed he feared for his life because this elderly woman approached him with a baseball bat.
Barry didn’t even thin of less violent tactics. Instead, with two shots to her torso, he murdered her life. After seven months delay Sgt. Barry was finally indicted for murder. Still, no trial date has been set: No doubt Police Benevolent Association lawyers are working around the clock to get the indictment thrown out, as was Richard Haste’s for the killing of Ramarley Graham in February of 2012.”Justice delayed is justice denied”!
The multiracial Justice and Peace Committee scoured the internet to find whatever response the cops’ officialdom had made to this telling evaluation. For months, nothing! Finally, we brought this travesty to the attention of our church’s governing board which, in July 2017, issued a firm request to the Police Commissioner and the Mayor asking for documentation of a response to the Inspector General’s report.
PLP understands this system depends on racism to thrive. Which is why we must continue to fight back. Erickson Brito, James Owens, Ariiel Galarza, Dwayne Jeune, Alexander Bonds, and Miguel Richards:  All brothers in mental distress (Black or Latin) shot to death by NYPD from November 2016 in Brooklyn to September 2017 in the Bronx.  And all killings were pronounces “justified” according to NYPD protocol. A police body camera chillingly documents Mr. Richard’s death on You Tube- a classic psychotic “suicide by cop “ case where the psychotic victim is goaded to expose his toy gun by belligerent military police orders before the fatal shots were fired. These racist killings will continue until the workers raise up and defeat the racist capitalist of the world!
PLP have repeatedly organized and demonstrated in solidarity with several victims, their families and friends. And, most importantly, we have reached out to a wide number of community organizations and congregations to develop a fighting platform to struggle to take away resources from the NYPD in order to fund civilian mental health-trained personnel who should be the first responders in all cases involving people in mental distress.
As members of PLP we understand that no reform is premiant and the only true way to free the working class from the horrors of this system is to over throw it with communist revolution! As the fighters against apartheid in South Africa powerfully sang “We have just begun to FIGHT, we have only started!”

BROOKLYN—On a chilly winter night a Brooklyn church held a forum  on the issue of environmental justice.
About 40 people debated the merits of a capitalist system which only cares about the working class for the cheap labor it provides. Can capitalism be reformed or does the whole rotten system have to go?
Three clergy and a reform activist described some of the problems and proposed policy changes while members of the Progressive Labor Party injected some communist consciousness into the conversation.
Environmental racism = capitalism as usual
The home minister explained how environmental racism uses “redlining” to confine poor Black workers to less desirable areas of a city that don’t have resources such as hospitals and fresh grocery stores. The majority of waste disposal sites are located in mostly Black and Latin working-class areas.
It was quite clear that working class people have little or no say in what ills are brought to their neighborhoods and are denied the opportunity to escape due to racist housing practices.
A Baptist minister spoke clearly and passionately about how a decaying capitalist system uses racism and sexism to oppress workers. It is environmental racism that allows people to live in an area without access to clean-lead free water. Working class people are at the whims of the developers and bankers as to what goes into their neighborhoods.
In Greenpoint, influx of new residents has caused rents to rise and is pushing out longtime residents with no concern to where they can afford to live. This is racist displacement. Environmental racism is pervasive destroying all working class communities with toxic waste placement, lousy services, high food prices, leaded water, etc.
Puerto Rico
Another minister spoke about the debacle in Puerto Rico, and how the working class people are struggling to maintain their dignity in the face of devastation and humiliation by U.S. imperialism.
The minister also spoke passionately about the beautiful bays filled with bioluminescent life that is getting dimmer as the restrictions on dumping waste have been lifted in the wake of the hurricanes. The “logic” of capitalism was called out as the $300 million contract to rebuild the electric grid was awarded to a small company with three employees in the home state of the Interior Secretary.
The last panelist proposed a reform strategy to get businesses to pledge to lower their carbon footprint through cleaner energy, by installing green roofs and solar panels.
After hearing how environmental racism destroys worker’s lives and seeing how workers face even more devastating conditions around the world, green roofs and solar panels seem like a capitalist pipe dream.
We need to address the root cause, rather than just the symptoms. A world run by the working class, communism, is the only solution. The profit motive for environmental racism will be eliminated. Our value for working-class safety and health will guide our collective decision-making and work. It will require countless years of profound unity, creative thinking and actions of  the world’s working class to make our environment safe again.
Call for mass actions
During the floor discussion some of the panelists promoted voting and advocating public officials for change. Others questioned what kind of system would allow people to live in such terrible conditions.
Several people, including one of the ministers, proposed mass actions by a united working class. Although this forum was very reform oriented,  we were able to bring the idea of struggle into the room. We raised the issue of fighting racism with multiracial unity.
Now we must win more friends to fight against the whole damn capitalist system.

U.S. President Trump’s recent move to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was a holiday gift to the Israeli ruling class, a big-power blessing of the country’s anti-Arab racism and apartheid. It is also a reflection of the embattled U.S. bosses’ growing isolation in the region and the world. This would lead to even more instability in the Middle East, collateral damage to U.S. allies, and a rise in mass anger and fight-back against the U.S.
In reversing decades of U.S. foreign policy against the advice of his Secretaries of State and Defense, the imperialist-in-chief was transparently playing to his evangelical and Zionist bases, including megabucks campaign donor Sheldon Adelson and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has invested heavily in Israeli settlements (New York Times, 12/6). Trump showed yet again that he has spun out of the control of the main wing, finance capital bosses, who have tried to preserve a charade of evenhandedness in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
With the other 14 members of the United Nations Security Council voting in favor, the U.S. was forced to veto an Egyptian-drafted resolution expressing “deep regret at recent decisions concerning the status of Jerusalem.” Trump threatened to cut off aid to any country that crossed him. UN Ambassador Nikki Haley vowed to “take names” of any countries backing the resolution at a December 21 emergency meeting of the UN General Assembly. According to a Reuters report, “Several senior diplomats said Haley’s warning was unlikely to change many votes in the General Assembly, where such direct, public threats are rare” (12/10). With the U.S. in relative decline against its imperialist rivalry with China and Russia, Trump’s bluster has less and less impact.
Imperialism Creates Israeli Killing Machine
All national borders are drawn to protect ruling-class interests. In 1947, the UN adopted a partition plan to succeed the British colonial mandate over Palestine. This was the original “two-state solution,” which led to the violent ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Arab workers from Israel, the new “Jewish state”; an adjacent “Arab state” that united with neighboring Jordan; and placement of the city of Jerusalem under UN trusteeship.
Although Jewish settlers had owned less than seven percent of Palestine’s territory, the partition gave them 56 percent of Palestine’s land. As Itzhak Galnoor noted in The Partition of Palestine: Decision Crossroads in the Zionist Movement, much of the Jewish state was in the Negev desert, a “vital land bridge protecting British interests from the Suez Canal to Iraq.”
The UN plan enabled British and U.S. imperialists to divide and control workers in the region. Pitting Arab and Jewish workers against one another has served the capitalist bosses by preventing workers from uniting and fighting their common oppressors. Ever since its creation, Israel’s racist Zionist regime has been of strategic significance for U.S. imperialism. It has waged several murderous wars to conquer more and more of Palestine.
As a holy city for three religions, Jerusalem has long been fought over by various murderous empires. Though the Israelis took full control of Jerusalem during the Six-Day War in 1967, the city remains a point of intense contention between the ruling classes of Israel and Palestine.  All of this plunder and murder has been funded by the U.S. to the tune of $80 billion in military aid. In 2016, another $39 billion was guaranteed to the Israeli killing machine by President Barack Obama.
A few examples of Israeli state terrorism:

• The forced displacement of more than a million Palestinians and the seizure of workers’ homes and land;
• 70 percent of Palestinian families have had one or more family members sentenced to jail in Israeli prisons for resisting the occupation;
• Torture has been institutionalized in Israeli prisons, and has victimized Arab children as well as adults.

Since Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, thousands of Arab workers have taken to the streets in protest, from Amman to Istanbul.  With the Israelis emboldened to expand their racist occupation into Palestine, more death for Arab and Muslim workers is in store. On December 15, the day after Trump’s announcement, the Israeli military fired on protesters in Gaza and the West Bank,  killing four workers and wounding hundreds more (NYT, 12/15).  
One Workers’ State
The Progressive Labor Party rejects the bosses’ narrative that Muslims and Jews have always existed in antagonism. We also reject their phony two-state “solution,” which Israeli settler land grabs have made unattainable. Multiple major uprisings, including two Intifadas have shown the bravery and willingness of Palestinian workers to rise up, but all have ended in defeat. The local, nationalist ruling classes offer no hope for workers. The cynical Hamas resorts to terror tactics, while Fatah has sold out.
Only building a mass, international working-class army and smashing religious and nationalist borders will end the suffering of the working class. PLP is organizing to create a world free of borders and racist and sexist exploitation. Join PLP!
U.S. Bosses’ Loss is Russian Bosses’ Gain
The need for the U.S. ruling class to regain lost ground is tied to the successes in the past year of the Russian ruling class in projecting their imperialist influence. The Russian bosses militarily backed Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad in the seven-year proxy war that killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions more.
With the U.S. missing in action, Russia has demonstrated its growing influence in the region by recruiting Turkey and Iran to begin peace negotiations. With U.S. credibility at an all-time low, exacerbated by Trump’s unstable decision-making over the Paris Accord, North Korea, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, it is likely that this signals a trend for the U.S. to be shut out of more and more negotiations as rival bosses seek new allies and cut new deals.
Russian President Vladimir Putin  has also been successful in drawing traditional U.S. allies Turkey and Egypt into their orbit. Turkey is expected to sign a $2 billion dollar deal this week to purchase Russian S-400 air defense systems, in addition to the country’s announcement to create an embassy in East Jerusalem in support of a Palestinian state (Los Angeles Times, 12/14). Russia has negotiated a nuclear deal with Egypt to use its airspace and bases, and has also collaborated on various military training exercises (NYT, 11/30).

Workers Must Reject Nationalism and Religion
 We take inspiration from thousands of workers around the world outraged by Trump’s decision. But much of it has a nationalist character. The bosses use nationalism and their construction of borders to convince us that other workers cause their suffering. The root of suffering is capitalism, which is reinforced by both the Jewish and Arab bosses.  
The racist, Zionist bosses and the racist, Palestinian bosses will never build a world that serve the needs of the working class.  Under capitalism, the only future workers in the Middle East can expect is low wages, checkpoints, collapsing education and healthcare systems, and violent crackdowns to control them from rebelling against those conditions.
Smash Borders with Communist Revolution
Workers on either side of the Israeli/Palestinian walls have more in common with each other than they do with the respective bosses. Worker on both sides face labor exploitation and budget cuts of social programs that are needed for their very existence. Palestinian and Black African workers are attacked most of all because of capitalism’s need for racist super-exploitation.
Palestinian and Black workers in the region have always risen up against racist terrorism, and Israeli workers must follow their lead to smash this profit system. The only hope for eventual peace is for workers to build one world without borders through a communist revolution.